Keller Dover is just a regular guy from Boston who goes with his wife Grace and six-year-old daughter Anna to their neighbours' house on what seems like a routine social occasion. No parent blinks an eye when Anna asks if she can take the neighbours' daughter Joy to their house to play, but when there's no sign of them back home later on, panic ensues as the families scour the nearby streets trying to find their precious children. The only clue as to what may have happened to them lies with a banged up RV that had been parked nearby. When young Detective Loki gets involved with the case, he manages to make an arrest on the driver - a seemingly timid and quiet young man called Alex Jones. However, with no solid evidence against him for the cops to keep him in custody in the case for the missing girls, they are forced to release him after 48 hours. Keller, angry with the verdict and fearing for the life of his daughter who he believes is still alive, decides to embark on his own investigation and kidnaps Alex at gunpoint in an attempt to extract information. Though through his panic and frustration in his quest to find his daughter, he may lose himself along the way.

Vince Ferro is badly in need of money to support his family. His only source of income comes from working low paying construction jobs. One day, Vince overhears a conversation about a recently deceased man, who was about to start a well paid job around the time of his accident. The company the man was about to start working for have apparently not heard the tragic news.

Although Paul Haggis' gut-punch of a story, In the Valley of Elah, is the first truly great narrative film about the Iraq War, it only spends a total of maybe five minutes there. The rest of the time, Elah is back in the U.S., dealing with all the stomach-churning consequences of what the country has sent young men over the sea to do. For this war story, combat -- that terrifying adrenaline high that changes many soldiers forever -- would be a distraction. The film comes at the war elliptically, immersing viewers in a world of soldiers, veterans, military bases, and civilian hangers-on, where President Bush is always pontificating from a nearby radio or television and everyone gets their check, directly or indirectly, from the Pentagon.

Elah is set in late 2004, when previously pro-war segments of the population started seeing cracks in the official flag-waving rhetoric, and ugly rumors started flying about what was actually going on Over There. Haggis' hard-boiled script -- closely based on Mark Boal's harsh, eye-opening article, "Death and Dishonor," published in Playboy in 2004 -- takes the form not of a war film but of a mystery, hiding its disquieting revelations in a familiar structure. Retired military policeman Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) finds out that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker, from Haggis' short-lived TV show The Black Donnellys), currently serving in Iraq, went AWOL not long after coming home on R&R. Having already lost his other son to combat in Afghanistan, and convinced he's getting some sort of runaround from the army, Hank hops in his winded old pickup and heads to Mike's base looking for answers.

How can you help but love a movie that starts with a title card reading, "This shit's true..."

Detailing the wacky misadventures over a month on the job at an auto dealership, apparently car sales is a far nuttier career choice than anyone had imagined. In fact, it's downright vicious, especially the way it's done at South Side, where bossman Daniel Benzali (channeling Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross character) is the kind of megalomaniacal nightmare you run into only in politics and Hollywood.

Take Ulysses from Homer's "Odyssey," turn him into a dusty but peculiarly dapper hillbilly escaped from a Mississippi chain gang, circa 1937, and whaddya got? Only the funniest, most inspired movie of Coen Brothers illustrious comedy careers.

Taking screwball cues from Depression Era Hollywood and usurping their title from the "message movie" Joel McCrea's frustrated director wanted to make in 1941's satire "Sullivan's Travels," this picture's writers-directors Ethan and Joel Coen cook up a masterpiece of a scruffy romp about a no-class fugitive trying to get home to his wife before she re-marries to a colorless, straw-hatted dandy who holds more promise as a provider.

And who did the Coens get to play their uncouth Cajun hero, Ulysses "Everett" McGill? Why if it isn't George Clooney in a perfectly jaunty performance that seems to channel both the roguish comedic charm of Clark Gable in "It Happened One Night" and the earnest zaniness of Cary Grant in his screwiest comedies.

Director Ivan Reitman goes rummaging around in his "Ghostbusters" bag of tricks to give his new comedy "Evolution" all the trappings of a major laugh fest -- but the one thing he forgot was the major laughs.

Until the picture hits a slight stride about half way through, its few weak snickers come mostly from knowing winks at the intentional irony of David Duchovny starring in what is, for all practical purposes, a spoof of "The X-Files."

Duchovny and Orlando Jones ("Say It Isn't So,""Double Take") star as quack professors at an Arizona community college who discover living microbes on a meteor that crashes to Earth near their campus. Flush with scientific exhilaration, they soon realize these lifeforms are evolving at an exponential rate. In a day they've become multi-celled organisms. Hours later they're extraterrestrial worms. By the time the military inevitably shows up to take control and kick the professors off their own project, full-blown insects and reptilian critters have appeared.